Life is full of tough decisions. Animals are constantly having to choose between how to avoid being someone else’s dinner, with whom to mate, with whom to fight, from whom to flee and so on. Making the right choice means assessing the likely outcome. Animals must be able to predict other’s behavior.
The power to deceive is our main weapon in the struggle for social survival. Like it or not, without it, we are sheep in the company of wolves.
In a treacherous social world- one rife with deceit and double-dealing- someone good at detecting dishonesty will be far less likely to be exploited than less skeptical people.
Mind reading facilitates deception and deception encourages mind reading.
Lying can be conscious or unconscious, verbal or non-verbal, stated or unstated. Lying is obliged by its very nature to cover its traces; to lie effectively, we must lie about lying!
Gossip has a ‘catch-22’ quality; it demands give-and take. In order to make gold, you must first have gold; in order to receive information about others, you must first have information to exchange. Obvious reserve is counterproductive: it makes you seem suspicious and isolates you from networks essential for social survival. One must appear to be open and trusting to encourage the flow of information, while, at the same time, carefully observing others for signs giving away their covert agendas. This is ‘social poker’ with a vengeance. Just like virtuoso card players, conversational partners must rely on small, subtle clues to genuine motives that seep through the cracks in consciously calculated displays of sincerity.
Nomadic hunter-gatherers tend to be moralistic and have similar concepts of deviant behavior, including rape, theft, murder, deception and the failure to cooperate. All use gossip to circulate information about transgressors. They have methods for identifying and punishing deviants such as shunning, ‘outing’ others, ridicule, desertion and, in extreme cases, execution. They disapprove of and have found ways to suppress the urge to dominate and control others. They tolerate only minimal levels of leadership. They regard dominance as anti-social, the whole group opposing anyone who tries to be a ‘big-shot’. They have not transcended the urge for power, they found an efficient way to police it. Counterdomination is domination by the majority of group members rather than by one individual or a small clique.
David Livingstone Smith- Why We Lie
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